A children’s book author and illustrator, Denise Ortakales went to her local librarian in Laconia 10 years ago to ask what books needed to be written.
The answer? Children in fourth grade, when the Granite State’s history is typically taught in school, often came to ask for books on Hannah Duston, the colonial-era Massachusetts woman famous for killing and scalping her Native American captors in modern-day New Hampshire, and later walking home to Massachusetts.
The problem, according to Laconia’s librarian? There weren’t any to lend.
And so Ortakales started digging.
Despite the ubiquity Duston enjoyed as an icon of the American frontier – or maybe because of it – Ortakales was mostly struck by how “ungrounded in fact” so much of Duston’s story ultimately turned out to be.
“As Americans, I think we tend to take our legends too seriously. We should probably question them a little,” she said in a phone interview last week from her home in Laconia.
Countless trips to libraries and archives across New England later, Ortakales has published a historical reconstruction of Duston’s story in the New Hampshire Historical Society’s journal. She is also 70,000 words into a historical fiction book for young adults inspired by the 400-year-old events.
Ortakales’ journal article leaves intact the bare bones of Duston’s story: her capture in Haverhill, Mass., at the hands of a Native American tribe in 1697 during a raid on her village. Her newborn child’s death at the hand of her captors, and Duston’s subsequent killing of the Native American party, including their children. Her escape is also well grounded in fact, as is the bounty she was awarded from the Massachusetts Bay Colony government in exchange for the 10 scalps she returned home with.
But the rest of the tales’ details, including some of its most iconic notes, don’t hold much water, according to Ortakales’ methodical reconstruction of the historical record.
The statue on the island in Boscawen where the Merrimack and Contoocook rivers meet – which supposedly marks the spot where Duston killed her captors – is likely in the wrong place, and certainly bears the wrong date, according to Ortakales.
And regarding Duston’s captors, little is actually known.
“We don’t even really know if they were Abenaki,” Ortakales said, referring to the loose federation of tribes in the region who spoke Algonquin.
But Ortakales is able to provide the historical context for the Indian raids on British settler villages, and new insight into their motivations and actions.
“I had not realized that Native Americans were sold into slavery by the British people. I was totally shocked by that. They don’t teach you that in school, or at least they didn’t when I was in school,” she said.
She also notes that Abenaki raiding parties did not typically include families – meaning the children that Duston killed likely joined the group after the raid, and did not have anything to do with her capture.
Ultimately, Ortakales said she was left struck with “just how unfair we’ve been to the original inhabitants of this country. And still are to this day.”
Many have cast Duston as either hero or villain. Ortakales emphatically cautions against doing so.
“You can’t judge what people did 300 years ago,” she said.
But while Ortakales insists on not judging the actors in the tale she tells, her account certainly notes the judgments of others. Ortakales takes special care to note the ways in which the Boston preacher who first publicized Duston’s story, Cotton Mather, relished in garishly describing the violence of the Indian raiders – all the while couching Duston’s own vengeful acts in euphemisms and biblical allusions.
“So wherein lyeth the truth?” Ortakales concludes her piece. “Perhaps a little closer than previously thought possible.”
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)